The Rake: How the House Always Gets Paid

Every hand of poker in a casino is played between the players, not against the house. So where does the casino's profit actually come from? It comes from the rake, a small cut skimmed off nearly everything that happens at the table.

A Cut of Every Pot

At typical stakes, the house takes roughly 5 percent out of every pot, up to some cap, often around $5. Bet $15, get a couple of callers, end up with a $40 pot, and the house quietly takes its 5 percent before the winner scoops the rest. It's a small amount on any single hand, and an enormous amount across a room full of tables running around the clock.

At higher stakes, say a 5-10 game or above, the math changes shape entirely. Instead of raking individual pots, the house rakes by time: every 30 minutes, each player at the table pays a big blind straight to the house, win or lose, played a hand or not. On top of that, players are expected to tip the dealer whenever they win a pot, a separate cost from the rake itself.

The Fund Behind the Bad Beat Jackpot

Some rooms take an extra dollar or two out of every pot for something called the bad beat jackpot, a fund that quietly builds for weeks across every table in the building, 24 hours a day, one small skim at a time.

The payout is the appeal: lose a hand with four of a kind or better, and you can walk away with something like $20,000, funded entirely by that accumulated skim. The obvious question is how anyone loses with a hand that strong. The answer circles back to something worth remembering from ranking hands in the first place: the idiot end of a straight flush, the lower version of a possible straight flush, can absolutely lose to a bigger one on the exact same board. When that happens in a room running a bad beat jackpot, losing that hand turns into the best bad outcome in poker.

Tournaments Take Their Cut Up Front

Tournaments handle the rake differently: it's built into the buy-in before a single card is dealt. Enter a $100 tournament, and the room might take $15 off the top, leaving $85 to actually go into the prize pool that gets split among the winners. Win one of those tournaments, and the same tipping expectation shows up again, a tip jar makes its way around for the room's biggest winners of the day.

None of this is hidden or unusual, it's simply the cost of the game having a room, a dealer, and a house willing to spread it. Every serious player factors the rake into their math before it factors into their results, because a game that looks profitable before the rake can look very different once it's subtracted out.

The Essentials

1. Casinos don't play poker against you, they make money by raking a small percentage out of pots, usually around 5 percent up to a cap.
2. High-stakes cash games are often raked by time instead of by pot, a fixed charge collected every half hour.
3. Bad beat jackpots are funded by a small ongoing skim and pay out huge sums to a player who loses with an extremely strong hand, like four of a kind, to something even stronger.
4. Tournament rake is built into the buy-in itself, a portion goes to the house before the rest becomes the prize pool.
5. The rake has to be part of any serious player's math, a game can look profitable before it and not after it.

Further Reading

• Book: The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky, the book most serious players point to for the math underneath hands like these.
• Wikipedia: Rake (poker) · Bad beat jackpot